videodrome

Videodrome is one of the best critiques of cat videos before cat videos were a thing. In David Cronenberg's follow-up to “Scanners” the writer and director solidified his cinematic voice addressing similar themes with a breadth of scale and a visionary perception of the place of new technologies in the public and private. Where in his previous feature a climatic sequence represented some sort of proto-internet telepath hack, Videodrome takes for its very focus the intrusion of malicious programming in domestic spaces and a collective consciousness.

It's hard to believe growing up in the age of the Internet, but there was once a time when something as outdated and old-fashioned as a VCR was a luxury, pirate cable stations existed and viral videos were shared not with a link, but with a VHS tape.